Demographics 101 : Back to Basics
Demographics get overlooked too often simply because of how basic and simple these optimizations appear to be. Let’s grind down the basics of what demographics are, how they are used, and how they can provide major performance lifts.
Google collects demographic information from users based on their settings and activity associated with their Google Account. These three demographics are Age, Gender, and Household Income. Below is the criteria of each of the following demographics.
Age: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+, and Unknown
Gender: Gender: Female, Male, and Unknown
Household Income: Top 10%, 11-20%, 21-30%, 31-40%, 41-50%, Lower 50%, and Unknown
These demographics provide the ability to specifically target anyone in the above criteria. Specifically targeting these demographics gives us, as marketers, the ability to place bid modifiers and or exclude specific audiences that could help with overall performance.
There are three major strategies that can be used to optimize performance.
Understanding the target audience right off the bat.
For example, if your client owns a maternity clothing e-commerce company, placing heaving bid modifiers (specific bid adjustments) on women and ages would be the correct call to action. However, there might be some value on male audiences, in which case you could layer on a negative bid modifier that would adjust bids to back into your goal CPA.
Exclude any audience that is not relevant.
For example, if a client is a private jet charter company, it would make sense to negatively exclude any household income in the lower 50% and 41%-50% due to the fact that chartering a private jet is very expensive and not relevant to anyone that is in the lower household income bracket. In the graph below, since excluding lower 50% and 41%-50% we have allocated the majority of the investment into the top 10% of household income.
Placing specific bid modifiers on dense demographic performance.
The more data the better when it comes to deciding whether or not to make any optimizations based on performance from these 3 demographics. If you take a look at the example below, we see that the two age segments 65+ and 45-54 have CPAs below our goal CPA of $55. We layered on an increased bid modifier which would increase bids of those target audiences by 15% and 10% respectively.
Although oftentimes overlooked, placing bid modifiers and or exclusions on target demographics can make a big impact on overall performance. This is just one layer of targeting that can be used effectively and efficiently. There are a number of other specific audiences that can be targeted and used for extreme targeting strategies and methods.
